The Foundational, the Moving and the Dangerous

More or less uninformed critics of Marxism have long decried it for its supposed economic reductionism, its totalizing answers, its mechanical focus on class struggle. They imagine Marx(ists) to be locked into a rigid and oversimplified narrative about “economic” forces that elides individual agency and unpredictable transformation. The irony is that Marx’s own approach and that of the most important Marxian political economists since is precisely the opposite. Marxian political economy is fundamentally about complexity, movement, and forces in tension, and about the complex intersections of social, political, cultural and economic relations. This is a radically different approach from mainstream economics and much of the rest of positivist social science, which tend to valorize only that which can be abstracted, categorized, bounded and quantified, and to bend towards rampant oversimplifications. The model of capital built by Marx cannot be broken into discrete variables — it is one made up of a myriad of interlocking, shapeshifting and unabashedly “dependent” parts, whose interrelations must be grasped in as much complexity as possible.

Indeed, the project of critical Marxian political economy for the past century and a half (and, for that matter, of much of the critical social sciences outside Marxism) has been to further complicate Marx’s model — to suss out and overcome Marx’s own blind spots and to better explore the role of, for example, the state, imperialism, law, race, gender, nature and geopolitics within capitalism. David Harvey, of course, has been one of the most important and prolific contributors to this project, pushing the boundaries of Marxist analysis in countless ways, including most famously in relation to our understanding of capitalism as a geographical phenomenon.

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I first read Harvey in my early 20s, after I had finished college and before I had figured out what I was going to do with myself. A critical human geographer and personal mentor of mine, Margaret FitzSimmons, handed me her copy of Nature, Justice, and the Geography of Difference. I was immediately fascinated. At the time, I knew nothing about the history of Marxism, (post)structuralism, debates on uneven development and so on. For me, as, I expect, for many, it was not merely sympathy for Harvey’s politics that drew me in, but precisely the dynamism and complexity and even the difficulty of the analysis. The way it refused bounded categorizations, the way it insisted on multi-dimensional dialectical relationships, the way that, rather than trying to simplify things, the text built to a more and more complex account of the world — and the way it simultaneously insisted on grounding these complex dynamics in concrete spatial and temporal transformations. Soon after reading the book, I sat in on Margaret’s graduate seminar at UCSC to read what were then Harvey’s most recent books, A Brief History of Neoliberalism and The New Imperialism. A year or so later, while applying to PhD programs in Geography, I audited a year-long seminar on Capital led by Richard Walker (a former student of Harvey’s), while also watching Harvey’s amazingly popular lectures on the text on YouTube. As an economic geographer in training at UC Berkeley, I read Limits to Capital, but otherwise I absorbed Harvey mostly through his towering influence on the whole field of geographical political economy. Returning to Harvey recently to read Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism reminded me of why Harvey was so instrumental in bringing me into both Marxian political economy and geography in the first place.

Published in 2014, the book considers the capitalist world system in the aftermath of the great financial crisis — and the lack of any significant course correction on the part of capitalists or states. Like much of Harvey’s work, the book not only offers a remarkably accessible explanation of Marx; it develops a Marxian approach to analyzing the present. More specifically, this book sets out both to identify the core contradictions of the moment, and to explain why thinking in terms of contradictions matters.

As Harvey explains, the most common understanding of “contradiction” is to describe two things that cannot be true at the same time. The Marxist concept of contradiction, in contrast, is more complex. It refers to a case in which “two seemingly opposed forces are simultaneously present within a particular situation, an entity, a process or an event” (1). The crucial emphasis here is on internal tensions, or “contradictory unity.” This is not about the contradiction betweencapital and, for example, technological innovation, but about the way the latter both emerges from and, ultimately, threatens the former. Degrees of contradiction also change over time. A certain tension may be more or less manageable for a while (though even then it is never about stasis, but rather about opposing forces in temporary balance); at other times, the same tension becomes more pronounced, creating more and more instability and disruption, bleeding into and exacerbating other contradictions, and, in some cases, erupting into general crises of capitalism; crises that spur new innovations, adaptations and further, if transformed, contradictions.

Harvey identifies seventeen key contradictions of capital (which he distinguishes from the much broader social constellation of capitalism). A key analytical contribution of the book is the way he divides these contradictions into three categories: the foundational, the moving and the dangerous.

The seven “foundational” contradictions, which Harvey defines as those without which capital simply cannot function, include those most explicitly discussed by Marx himself (use value and exchange value, capital and labor, production and realization), as well as those which Harvey draws out as contradictions perhaps more explicitly than Marx (e.g., the social value of labor and the money form, private property and the state). Central to Harvey’s analysis is that these contradictions are interlocking, so that any major shift in one ends up having cascading effects on the others. In the struggle between capital and labor, for example, increased exploitation tends to lead both to the production of more and more value and, all things being equal, to reduced possibilities for the realization of that value. Conversely, no contradiction can be dealt with without simultaneously addressing all the others. Any attempt to move towards a society that emphasizes use values over exchange values, for example, must also engineer a radically different money form.

This constant attention to not only the internal dynamics of each contradiction, but to the ways each intersects with all the others continues in the next section on the “moving” contradictions of capital, which Harvey sees as far more unstable and unpredictable than the foundational contradictions. The constant evolution of these contradictions is neither random nor foreseeable, with some moving in “cumulative” or path dependent ways (technology and work, divisions of labor or uneven geographical development); some moving more like a “pendulum” (monopoly and competition, wealth and poverty); and some moving in far more indeterminate and inchoate ways (social reproduction, freedom and domination). The complex transformation of these contradictions cannot simply be understood as resulting from the more foundational contradictions. Rather, Harvey sees these moving contradictions, and their relatively independent development, as providing much of the dynamism for the transformation of capitalism as a whole.

The book’s final section turns to what Harvey sees as the three most “dangerous” contradictions for capital—and for humanity—in the current moment: endless compound growth, capital’s relation to nature, and universal alienation. These are, once again, intertwined with one another, as well as with the foundational and the moving contradictions. The first chapter of this section provides a relatively straightforward but still startling discussion of the asymptotic character of compound growth—and of the implications of the fact that, in the history of capital accumulation, we may only just be getting to the steep part of the curve. The next chapter examines tensions between accumulation and “nature” as a contradiction internal to capitalism understood as an ecological system. The third considers the way all the contradictions contribute to the more and more pronounced destruction of social ties, to a pervasive sense of loss and sorrow, to increasing anger and hostility; in short, to human alienation — and to the ways in which this might provoke mass political resistance.

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Crucially, (and despite the second half of the book’s title) all three are dangerous but still not necessarily fatalcontradictions. For Harvey, Marx was no teleological determinist. This is an analysis that sees the interlocking contradictions of capital as creating more and more serious problems for accumulation, but that also sees capitalism as a transformative, responsive, and adaptive system that is constantly reemerging in new and unpredictable ways. This does not mean the book offers no predictions. The future in which capital does not succumb is not, in Harvey’s view, a pretty one:

Marx’s position, and I broadly follow him in this…, is that capital can probably continue to function indefinitely but in a manner that will provoke progressive degradation on the land and mass impoverishment, dramatically increasing social class inequality, along with dehumanisation of most of humanity, which will be held down by an increasingly repressive and autocratic denial of the potential for individual human flourishing (in other words, an intensification of the totalitarian police-state surveillance and militarised control system and the totalitarian democracy we are now largely experiencing). (220)

The past decade since the book’s publication has certainly not offered much evidence to the contrary.

And yet, what motivates this whole project, and all Harvey’s projects, is the possibility of something else — a something else that will only be made possible through the mass political will to create that something. In short, through revolution. This is not to be imagined, Harvey says, merely as a revolt of the traditional proletariat. It is not only that the labor force has changed dramatically over the past century, but also that the sources of oppression in and, thus, possible resistance to capitalism have always been multiple. Harvey unapologetically embraces what he terms the “revolutionary humanist” Marx; the worst part of all this, for Harvey, is not growing inequality or labor exploitation, per se, but the “unbearable denial of the free development of human creative capacities and powers” (220).

It is fitting then that Harvey closes the book by arguing that the only potentially fatal contradiction for capital is the “revolt of human nature” — in other words, a revolt against the intensification of human alienation of all forms. The centrality of alienation for Harvey is philosophical, moral, and existential. It is also political. He suggests—he hopes—that a focus on alienation might form a core around which many promising but heterogeneous and spatially scattered projects of political resistance could come together to forge concerted anti-capitalist resistance. Of course, all this is only potentially fatal for capital. The vision of the future Harvey ends on is split: either we will face continued compound capital accumulation and an increasingly dystopian future or we will see mass social uprising and transformation.

Here lies the true significance of this whole line of analysis. Before he even gets to the first of the seventeen contradictions, Harvey writes that “perhaps the most important contradiction of all [is] that between reality and appearance” (4). And breaking free from the “fetishism” that disguises the relations of capital all around us requires understanding the interlocking contradictions at the core of capital. These contradictions drive capitalist dynamism, crises, and transformation. They also create new frictions, openings, and possibilities. As Harvey writes: “to capture the sense of movement is politically vital, for the instability and the movement provide political opportunities at the same time as they pose critical problems” (90). There is a subtler point at work here too. If alienation might offer a core around which to forge alliances across political projects, it is an understanding of this dense thicket of tangled contradictions that can help show why and how our many different forms of alienation are, in fact, connected to one another.

To return to where I started, Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capital offers a powerful example of the type of open-ended, non-reductionist, dynamic and humanist Marxism that attempts to engage with and theorize the complexity of the world rather than simplify it. A decade on from the book’s publication, its usefulness is proven both by the intensification of the key contradictions Harvey identifies, and by the further evolution of capital(ism) in ways he could not have fully foreseen. Already in 2014, Harvey explored the ways automation and AI exacerbate the contradiction between the production and realization of value; the likely intensification of trade and resource wars driven by growing overaccumulation and by the struggle over where necessary crises of devaluation will occur; the rising forces of autocracy and oligarchy. All these dynamics have since moved to the forefront of even mainstream political discourse. More recent developments now demand the extension of Harvey’s analysis to, for example, the way a new explosion of AI technologies presents an immediate threat not only to labor but to the energy transition; to increasingly brutal military campaigns driven by imperial ambitions, ethnonationalism, and racism; and to the collapse of the liberal international order, driven, most dramatically, by that order’s own hegemon. In this moment of extreme danger for humanity and, possibly, for capital, the ability to think in terms of relations, complexity, movement, and contradiction is one we cannot afford to lose.

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